Insomnia solvable, flu resistant, cancer avoidable

Insomnia solvable, flu resistant, cancer avoidable

Health RoundUp — The Good News and Not So Good

Both as individuals and as society we can take action to stay healthy. We trim, blend, and append three 2009 articles from: (1) US News & World Report, Mar 2, on insomnia by Michelle Andrews; (2) Reuters, Mar 2, on flu drugs by Maggie Fox; and (3) WebMD Health News, Feb 26, on cancer by Miranda Hitti.

by Miranda Hitti, by Maggie Fox, and by Michelle Andrews

Can’t Sleep? Why Insomnia Shouldn’t Be Ignored

The National Sleep Foundation found that nearly a third of Americans are losing sleep because they’re worried about the state of the economy and its implications for their personal finances.

People who consistently get too little sleep may be at risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, or psychiatric problems, particularly in women.

On average, 2 out of 3 people experience significant improvement in their sleep after either taking a sleep medication or being treated with cognitive behavior therapy, a form of talk therapy. While sleeping pills work only as long as you continue to take them, behavioral change, on the other hand, can last a lifetime.

JJS: A deeper solution could come from economic justice: eradicating ones money worries, creating opportunities for one to do what they love for recompense, and allowing time off for diversion and rounding out oneself. To transform the economy, government must do more than track disease but also defend everyones rights.

Resistance to flu drug widespread in US – study

The most common strain of flu circulating in America now resists the main drug used to treat it, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Virtually all cases — over 98% of all flu samples from the H1N1 strain — were resistant to Roche AG’s Tamiflu pill. Last flu season, only 19% of H1N1 viruses tested were Tamiflu-resistant.

Four patients infected with the resistant strain have died, including two children. This season, nine children have died from influenza, most apparently healthy before they got infected. Influenza kills 36,000 people in the US in an average year.

The quick spread of Tamiflu-resistant flu surprised doctors. The organism will continue to evolve, doctors said.

GlaxoSmithKline, which makes the rival flu drug Relenza, said there was no indication influenza viruses were resistant to its drug, used less commonly than Tamiflu.

Flu already resists two older drugs, rimantadine and amantadine. There is no indication the two other flues now circulating, H3N2 and influenza B, resist Tamiflu. The CDC recommends using a cocktail of flu drugs.

JJS: Such relentless proliferation reminds me of the story of The Sorcerers Apprentice. Instead of spreading the use of drugs, which spurs viruses to evolve ever more virulent forms, perhaps we should consider strengthening the immune system. Reducing the amount of pollution we emit into the ecosystem could help do that. And cutting pollution leads us to a new economy thats fair and efficient for all.

1 in 3 Common Cancers May Be Preventable

About a third of common adult cancers may be preventable in the US — and that doesn’t count cancers that could be prevented by not smoking.

The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and its sister organization, the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), estimate that in the US, eating a nutritious diet, being physically active, and keeping body fat under control may prevent:

38% of breast cancers

45% of colorectal cancers

36% of lung cancers

39% of pancreatic cancers

47% of stomach cancers

69% of esophageal cancers

63% of cancers of the mouth, pharynx, or larynx

70% of endometrial cancers

24% of kidney cancers

21% of gallbladder cancers

15% of liver cancers

11% of prostate cancers

The WCRF/AICR report recommendations include:

New neighborhoods should be designed to encourage walking and cycling.

Food and drink industries should price healthy fare competitively with other products and stop promoting sugary drinks and unhealthy foods to kids.

JJS: The reason to have government is to defend our rights. Getting away with making misleading claims about anything is wrong and liars should be punished. With enforcement, government should also use geonomics — raise and spend public revenue sensibly.

Presently, government subsidizes agri-business, which makes junk food artificially cheap (and farmland dear). Instead of subsidizing any business, government could pay dividends to residents, similar to Alaskas oil shares. Thatd give people more money to spend on healthy food and let unhealthy food rise to its true, higher, cost.

Also, government taxes our efforts but not so much our socially-generated values, such as the value of land, which makes sprawl artificially cheap. Instead of letting speculators and owners keep the value we as a society generate, government could shift taxes off buildings, sales, and wages, onto locations, natural resources, and pollution. Thatd motivate owners and developers to not waste land but build compact cities made to order for pedestrians and cyclists and a healthy lifestyle.

Our editor published The Geonomist which won a Californian GreenLight Award, has appeared in both the popular press (e.g., TruthOut) and academic journals (e.g., USC’s Planning and Markets), been interviewed on radio and TV, lobbied officials, testified before the Russian Duma, conducted research (e.g., for Portland’s mass transit agency), and recruited activists and academics to the Forum on Geonomics. A member of the International Society for Ecological Economics and of Mensa, he lives in America’s Pacific Northwest.

One Response to Insomnia solvable, flu resistant, cancer avoidable

In my opinion majority of american people are very very innocent and are totally mislead ny thier Govt., they are tied to afixed way of living borne on credit card and dies on credit card. they move in a cirlce and never get out of debt all their life. they have very limited means to survive and those in Govt enjoy all luxury at the cost of poor tax payers. also ameican system of helath care is nothing but rip-off.
alopaathy makes you dies while trating you for some medical symptoms. either if fails your kidney or other organs.Pharma cos are the biggest source of manipulation and extotriion and poor american s can do nothing about it. GM can not prodce a car that sells and get all money it watns to float what a pity. american pay for GMs survial simply because it can not keep pace with Japanese technology. what a farce.
I pity americans who know nothing about the world and are least kknowldgeable and all the lies that us Govt tells them they belive in them and fight with everyone for no apprent reasons. people will have to change in america become more knowldgeable and do not draw blindly govt propaganda.

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

a neologism for sharing “rent” or “social surplus” – the money we spend on the nature we use. When we buy land, such as the land beneath a home, we typically pay the wrong person – the homeowner. Instead, since land cost us nothing to make and is the common heritage of us all, rather than pay the owner, we should pay ourselves, our neighbors, our community. That is, we should all pay land dues to the public treasury, then our government would pay us land dividends from this collected revenue. It’s similar to the Alaska oil dividend, almost $2,000 last year. Indeed, the annual rental value of land, oil, all other natural resources, including the broadcast spectrum and other government-granted permits such as corporate charters, totals several trillion dollars each year. It’s so much that some could be spent on basic social services, the rest parceled out as a dividend, as Tom Paine suggested, and taxes (except any on natural rents) could be abolished, as Thomas Jefferson suggested. Were we sharing Earth by sharing her worth, territorial disputes would be fewer, less intense, and more resolvable.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat – or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off – a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old loggers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old log-gers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

the study of the money we spend on the nature we use. When we pay that money to private owners, we reward both speculation and over-extraction. Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, says, “One of the reasons McDonald’s is such a rich company is not because it sells a lot of burgers but because it owns the land at some of the best intersections in the world. The main reason Kim and I invest in such properties is to own the land at the corner of the intersection. (p 200) My real estate advisor states that the rich either made their money in real estate or hold their money in real estate.” (p 141, via Greg Young) When government recovers the rents for natural advantages for everyone, it can save citizens millions. Ben Sevack, Montreal steel manufacturer, tells us (August 12) that Alberta, by leasing oil & gas fields, recovers enough revenue to be the only province in Canada to get by without a sales tax and to levy a flat provincial income tax. While running for re-election, provincial Premier Ralph Klein proposes to abolish their income tax and promises to eliminate medical insurance premiums and use resource revenue to pay for all medical expense for seniors. After all this planned tax-cutting and greater expense, they still expect a large budget surplus. Even places without oil and gas have high site values in their downtowns, and high values in their utility franchises. Recover the values of locations and privileges, displace the harmful taxes on sales, salaries, and structures, then use the revenue to fund basic government and pay residents a dividend, and you have geonomics in action.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat — or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off — a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.

an alternative to conventional land trusts. Just as it seems some functions should not be left to the market – private courts and cops invite corruption (while private mediation is fine) – just so some land should not be left in the market. That said, sacred sites do not make much of a model for treating the vast acreage of land that we need to use. So the usual trust model, which is anti-use and counter-market, can not apply where it’s needed most. Trust proponents worry about ownership and control – two very human ambitions – but they’re not central. Supposedly, we the people own millions acres – acres that private corporations treat as private fiefdoms – and conversely, the Nature Conservancy owns wilderness the public can some places use as parks. So, the issue is not who owns but who gets the rent – ideally, all of us.

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Thoughts for the Day

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.

Albert Einstein

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Thomas Jefferson

Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart.

Mencius

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.

Norman Vincent Peale

Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.

Yogi Berra

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Mark Twain

The equal right of all men and women to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air. It is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men and women have a right to be in this world and others do not.

Henry George

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Aesop

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.